Céline Cotton

Céline Cotton joins Beacon Academy as a World Languages Instructor while she completes her Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies at Northwestern University. After a preparatory class in France, she was admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and completed her master’s degree in Film Studies at Paris Diderot. She wrote her first master’s thesis on the representation of the body in Jean Epstein’s work and her second master's thesis on the ambiguous relationship between Jean Epstein and the European avant-gardes working on the archives in the Cinemathèque Française. She is interested in early cinema and photography with a focus on the way the image may embody both collective and individual memory through the representation of bodies. Céline is currently conducting research on "Fatigue and the Rhythms of Life: Cinema of Tired Bodies" and on an article titled "Le Sacrilege de l'Idole: Photography and the Sacred in Jean Genet's Notre Dame des Fleurs". She has been the instructor for Beginning French and Intermediate French at Northwestern University, and she has also served as a teaching assistant for courses such as French Existentialism and French Politics, Society, & Culture.